Timedance: A new UK techno sound

The Bristol record label and party is at the heart of a growing movement

Words: Patrick Hinton | Photography: Alex Digard

19 May 2016

“There's a lot of very backwards-looking dance music which is just fucking boring,” says Batu, who runs the Timedance label and party out of Bristol. His point of view makes sense given that he’s involved in creating and incubating a new, distinctly UK style of techno that has taken root in the South West city as well as other parts of the country. And the only way it faces is forward.

Alongside fellow Bristol artists Hodge, Facta, Lurka, Ploy, Bruce and Asusu, London-based Beneath and Manchester’s Alex Coulton, the 22 year old is a key figure in an inventive crop of young producers making a low-end, broken and forceful style of underground dance music that’s tailor made for the soundsystems of warehouses and basements.

Like many of 2016’s bubbling sub genres and micro niches, it hasn’t got an official name but it does have origins in Bristol and the creativity of two scene godfathers who kept the bass-heavy sound of the city moving in the wake of dubstep. In 2010, Pinch released ‘Croydon House’, a sleek, dusky meld of dubstep and techno, and in 2011, Peverelist and Kowton put out the first Livity Sound 12”, minting the start of a project that also marries the two genres, with focus on the seismic bass weight of the former with the calculated dancefloor-focused rhythms of the latter. They then started labels to foster new talent specialising in this hybrid, Pinch with Cold Recordings in 2013 and Pev with Dnuos Ytivil in 2012. The imprints have acted as a launchpad for a steady building UK movement that Batu and his peers, who have all started labels and club nights of their own, are at the forefront of.